Situation: You’re a business in a capitalist environment. Sales are good, you have your customers and life goes on. You also have one more thing to reckon with: competition. Competition is of two types – offline and online. Offline competitors are the companies who you view as brick and mortar competition in your marketplace.
For example, if you’re Borders, you probably view Amazon and Barnes and Noble as your competitor. The three of you all sell books, DVDs and other entertainment/leisure accessories. Therefore all of you are vying for the same audience to market to in both offline and online channels.
However, when you target that audience online, you encounter a different type of competitor.This competitor isn’t anything like your company or your offline competitor’s company, but targets the same keyword phrases you are aiming to rank for and track on an ongoing basis for your search engine marketing campaign. This competitor is very stealth-like and can engage in a frontal attack on your online (at least from an SEM perspective) right away.
It’s important to recognize that marketing strategies and tactics for the online world vary a lot from the things that are done in the offline world. It is almost as if these two worlds are diametrically different. From an online perspective, it is crucial to research which websites are showing up on your most important non-branded keyword phrases (bear in mind that you have to keep the customer decision funnel in mind while deciding on the keywords you want to rank for). The most consistent website results are your online competitors. Bear in mind, that your direct competitors offline may not even be in your top 5 online competitor list.
Also, bear in mind that while you may have competitors that sell the same kind of products that you do online, quite a few of them will be resellers or have a wide range of products that they sell online and may be located in other countries. All these diverse competitors will target your converting keywords and as a results you’ll see higher SEM costs as firms try to outbid each other for keywords. Use a tool like WebPosition Gold or Adgooroo to monitor visibility statistics for your target keyword phrases.
It’s also key to identify the search engine marketing tactics they are using to achieve rankings on the critical keyword phrases.
Competitor organic tactics to watch out for:
Page Content – How much content is on the competitor’s ranking pages? What keywords are they trying to rank for? Are they engaging in keyword stuffing? Is their keyword density very high? Are they trying to game their way into Google’s eyes as a relevant source for that keyword phrase?
URL Structure – What do the competitor’s URLs look like? Are they static urls or dynamic? Knowing the answer to this tells you how methodical they are with their SEO implementation. Are their urls written cleanly, with relevant keywords representing the theme of the page in them?
Meta Data – What meta keywords are they using for the page? Do the keywords appear in the title and description for the page as well? Are the meta data keyword phrases similar to those you are targeting for your campaign?
Source Code – How is the code formatted? Is it easy for a search engine spider to navigate? Is there flash or too much javascript?
Internal Navigation – How does the navigation look? Providing text-based links to other significant parts of your site invites search engine spiders to keep searching the site. Does the competitor’s site have a sufficient amount of internal links? Do these links have the right keywords as their anchor text?
Link Popularity – How many quality links are pointing to the competitor’s site? A higher quantity of legitimate links pointing to your competitor’s site may help them rank higher on certain keyword phrases, as search engines give preferences to sites with high link popularity. Use these links to identify partners that you’d like to link to. SEOMoz has a great juicy links tool that you can use to identify sites that you can solicit for links to your content.
Conducting research on how your top online competitors utilize the various elements above, and where they may be doing a better job than you, will help you understand the gaps in your internet marketing strategy and allow you to take the necessary steps to improve your actions online.
